Maybe you have been tating for a while, and you are skilled enough to execute JD Crowe designs which are very attractive but very time consuming and somewhat difficult. Maybe you additionally have been experimenting with JD Crowe style coloring patterns with your other stencils to dazzle your customers. Well, if you are or considering it, I just wanted to show you how you could simulate JD Crowe coloration in a digital format which you can then use for flash or put on your website.

This process hinges on one trick which you may or may not use currently. It is something the GIMP calls “alpha to selection.” This technique selects everything that is not transparent and can help us a lot when we are coloring designs because anything that is not selected will not be filled while we use our paint brushes or buckets.

So the first thing to do is to go get the design you will be working with off the web at TatStore.com. I believe that I’ve instructed on this topic before but if you have forgotten simply find the stencil you would like and enlarge it to the maximum size by clicking it. Once there, right click the image and select either “Save Image As…” or “Save Picture As…” depending on your browser. All we are doing here is downloading the picture on to your computer. Of course, if you already have a picture of the design on your hard drive there’s no reason to get another one. However you got it, open up the picture in your favorite graphic editor like Photoshop or GIMP, and we are ready to roll.

The first step is a bit unintuitive if you are not used to working in a graphic editor. Jpegs open as background layers which means that they don’t support transparency. So you need to double click the layer in photoshop or right click the layer in GIMP and add alpha layer. This will allow you to erase parts of the picture which then become transparent, you’ll know you haven’t done this step correctly if when you erase from the layer it becomes the background color instead of the checkerboard transparency which you should see.

Once all of the white is deleted from the original image you now have basically an inverted stencil. You can proceed in several ways from here, I will outline two. #1 you can set this layer to protected transparency which means that it will not let you paint over any transparent areas. That’s pretty nice. Alternatively you can select the non-transparent areas by pressing control and clicking the preview thumbnail of the layer in Photoshop, or in GIMP, right click the layer and select “alpha to selection.” Now as long as that selection is up you can paint it however you want and it will only paint in the selected area.

That’s great and all but to take it to the next level we are going to do some editing of our selections under the selection menu in either program.

First we lay down a black layer. Then, make a new layer and before you fill it with another color be sure to feather your selection somewhere in the forty or fifty pixel area. You can find that, as I said, under the selection menu. So now you should have a very murky looking picture with very very soft edges. So to clean those up reform the original selection through the same methods we used before and contract it somewhere in the 5 pixel range. This will be the width of the black border in the final product. Then invert your selection, once again in the selection menu, and delete what is now selected. You should end up with a black outline with a progressively softened inner color. For a more dramatic effect, add even another color or white on top of all three with an even stronger feather.

Here’s my example, I’ve also put it at our TatStore Blog Design Work pool on flickr. Feel free to join the pool, and upload your own. Also comment here with your attempts. If you have any problem getting your work to show up, be sure to email me and I’ll get it put up for you.